I’m not sure if this is a verb; if it is, it’s certainly an archaic one. Whether grammatically correct or not, it seems to be how I am spending large chunks of my time of late.
I should back up a bit. My profession requires me not just to observe others, but to actively engage with them. To “take the temperature of the room”, using a horrid cliché, and to adjust how I am presenting the information I am obliged to. In addition, I have to gauge the individuals I’m presenting to – are they having bad days? Are they having good days? Distracted? Focused? Neither? (Typically, for each person, a graph ranging between “distracted” and “focused” as a function of time would look like a white-noise spectrum as a function of frequency. It’s basically random.)
As I get older, I’m finding that to be increasingly more challenging. Not because my audience has changed – they have not, not really – but because I have. With every passing year, I’m having a harder time wanting to engage with those I’m supposed to engage with in a positive way. I don’t mind the observational part, so much, but it’s the adjusting-my-responses-to-what-I-see part that has become harder.
It might be the stresses of the last few years, both in the “waves hands at everything” sense as well as specific stresses in my job (many of which I’ve been able to leave behind, fortunately). It might be simply getting older and having a more expansive sense of how I am actually spending the remaining time I have left – and not being happy about it. It might be a vitamin deficiency. Who knows?
So, back to “spectating”. I’ve always, always, always found people fascinating. I guess that’s at least partly why I have been able to do what I do for the last quarter-century or so. It’s also why I used to be known as a good listener – from the time I was in high school listening to girls I wanted to date complain about their rotten boyfriends (well, to be honest, there were probably other motivations then than just generally being fascinated by people) to now. People don’t seem to mind talking to me. And I have often enjoyed engaging with them, too – being sympathetic to their drama, being a shoulder to cry on, to have a laugh with. But right now, outside of a very, very small circle (my immediate family, basically), I’m not sure I can engage in the same way. It’s become too emotionally taxing. Maybe I am really an introvert at heart, and haven’t given myself the time needed to recharge my emotional batteries. Maybe I’m just tired. But I have this repeated dream that I can just be a fly on the wall and just listen without being expected to respond in any way. I want to be simply someone who watches, listens, understands.
The problem I have with that is that I don’t feel like that’s fair in some abstract moral sense – I feel like if I take from someone (which, to be honest, is what I’d be doing by just watching/listening), I owe them something in return. They are offering a part of themselves to me, and it feels churlish to not give something back. So things go around and around; I listen to other people’s dramas, respond as sympathetically as I can, and hopefully help them in some fashion. But this exhausts me, which also makes me feel that I’m going around in circles. Sometimes I think retreating to monastery or a small cabin in the woods where I didn’t have to deal with anyone for a few weeks (months?) would be the solution, but I don’t want to abandon those I love. Partial retreat, then, and allowing myself to “spectate” when I have the emotional/mental space to do it…
(There’s heavy irony here in writing about this, because I’m clearly not a person who can do without the attention of others. If I were I would hardly write about this on a public blog. I guess my hypocrisy runs deep – I claim to only want to be an observer and to not interact, and yet, here I am. My only defense is that I really would love to know that I’m not alone feeling like I need to escape from the dramas of others. For the first time in a post, I’m opening it to comments, if anyone wants to weigh in.)